It is typical for a provider of multimedia content to provide multimedia content to a digital television (DTV) cable headend facility. Such a headend facility is a control center of a DTV cable system, where incoming signals are amplified, converted, processed, and combined into a common cable for transmission to customers.
Indeed some standards have been developed for a multimedia content provider to effectively interface with a headend facility for each multimedia asset (e.g., a movie) that it receives. For example, such standards have been developed for providers of video-on-demand (VOD) and subscription VOD assets to interface with headend facilities.
In particular, an organization called CABLELABS™ has developed an Asset Definition Interface (ADI) for VOD and subscription VOD. CABLELABS (Cable Television Laboratories, Inc.) is a non-profit research and development consortium of the cable television industry.
Its VOD ADI defines a standard interface that allows multimedia content providers to communicate VOD assets and information about these VOD assets into a cable headend facility. VOD assets include the multimedia content (e.g., movies). “Metadata” is included in the asset descriptor provided by the ADI. That includes content metadata, rights metadata, content identification, operational information, and business/pricing metadata.
Generally, metadata is data about data. Typically, metadata describes how and when and by whom a particular set of data was collected, and how the data formatted.
However, no standard interface has been developed for providers of other types of assets to effectively and easily communicate to a cable headend facilities and then ultimately to the user of such a headend.